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Ethics as First Philosophy Bettina Bergo
The idea that ethics could be first philosophy should strike us as curious. Should
we understand this as philosophically regressive, a strategy motivated by psychology or
social construction? To wit, no philosophical theorizing is possible without consideration
of the human being in light of a consciousness that develops socially or in families, by
stages. Should we understand ethics as first philosophy in terms of a refusal of
distinctions between factical existence and transcendental categories—as a presentation
of pre-philosophical practices, in the guise of phenomenology or another “empiricism?”
Above all, what is ethics in a thought, like Levinas’s, that sets forth neither rational
prescription nor criteria for calculating happiness or pleasures? I will not summarize
Levinas’s philosophy here so much as answer the questions: What is first philosophy if
and when it is ethics; and, what is meant here by “ethics?”
For Levinas, the claim that ethics is first philosophy requires extensive critical
work. He must recapitulate and limit philosophies built on identification (i.e., the law of
non-contradiction, sufficient reason, and dialectics). He must revisit the thought for
which truth is the free subsumption by cognition (in an Aristotelian or Husserlian sense)
of an object that gives itself according to profiles (Levinas, 1998a: 69). First philosophy
in Levinas will thus be unfolded thanks to two critical efforts: evincing the limits of
comprehension (in light of the phenomenological constitution of meaning), and
redefining transcendence, away from idealist forms toward embodied, intersubjective
experience. He is not the first twentieth century thinker to attempt this. Heidegger,
Merleau-Ponty, and Henry also present critiques of formalist elements in Husserl’s
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phenomenology of time-consciousness, in which the unity of ongoing immanent time
prevails over variable intensities of embodied, “hyletic,” data or changes in sensation.
Nevertheless, the objects of Levinas’s critique themselves form configurations: Husserl’s
transcendental egology and Heidegger’s Dasein, criticized in light of embodied
sensibility; Husserl and Heidegger, scrutinized in their respective approaches to
intersubjectivity. Levinas’s first philosophy will be unfolded through a critique of
fundamental ontology’s claim to the status of protē philosophia (Levinas, 1969: 47; 15-
17Fr). Elaborating ethics as first philosophy thus means undercutting hermeneutic
phenomenology’s deformalization of time in which lived “temporality reveals itself as
the meaning of authentic care” (Heidegger, 1962: 374; 432Gr), and care is the
fundamental way of being-in-the-world for the Dasein concerned with its own existence.
Neither the phenomenology of transcendental consciousness as a unified, dynamic
“temporalizing” and identification (as ownness), nor the interpretation of a temporal
being ahead-of-itself in its projects could give us ethics as first philosophy. Levinas’s
protracted task will be to draw phenomenological description away from epistemological,
even some existentialist, concerns. His ethics as first philosophy thus confronts two basic
challenges: 1) that of passing “beneath” Being as worldly, future-oriented, and
approached through a questioning “site” (Da-sein) (Heidegger, 1962: 374-5; 432-3Gr);
and 2) that of deconstructing consciousness as the unified and dynamic, intentional
construction of objects, in the world or in immanence. If there is any doubt that Levinas’s
first philosophy is directed primarily at Heidegger’s existential philosophy and at the
aforementioned formalism in Husserl’s phenomenology, then the address he gave in 1982
at Louvain, “Éthique comme philosophie première,” readily convinces us of this,
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although it begins, appositely, with Aristotle.
First Philosophy in Aristotle: Paradoxes of Metaphysics and Ethics
The 1982 address offers retrospective insight into Levinas’s middle work, Totality
and Infinity, because the project of first philosophy is there indebted to Aristotle, and
because the condensed 1980s lecture opens with the conundrum that first philosophy
posed to Greek metaphysics. Levinas’s 1982 strategy is explicit: to define first
philosophy by bringing to light a parallelism in Aristotle’s Metaphysics and his
Nicomachean Ethics, thereafter turning to Husserl and Heidegger. In his return to
Aristotle, Levinas adopts an approach redolent of the young Heidegger, in search of
concrete, lived contents against the more idealistic conceptions of Husserlian
phenomenology (i.e., intentionality, hylemorphism). Thus Levinas opens his lecture,
controversially reading Aristotle’s ontology together with his theology. He moves
between Metaphysics’ books Gamma and Lambda. Book Gamma sets forth the
uniqueness of a discipline whose object was universal being—“that which is qua thing-
that-is, and with this its states, conditions and predicates” (chapter I)—pursued down to
the senses of truth and error (chapters VII-VIII). The associated science is first
philosophy, integrating ontology and deferring the question of theology. As it is the
philosopher whose science concerns substance and principles (Aristotle, 1933: 1005b5),
he must also be concerned with universal being and “the most extreme causes [tas
akrotátas]” (Aristotle, 1933: 1003a27). The pursuit in first philosophy of absolute origins
necessarily leads to Aristotle’s divinity as first cause, and the apparently dual sciences of
being in general versus that of unconditioned causes has given rise to three questions: that
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of their identification (the cause of being qua being, merging with ontology); that of
priority, and that of a tension between philosophy and theology driving Aristotle’s
metaphysical project. Levinas observes that Aristotelian metaphysics led “to a God
defined by being qua being.” According to Levinas’s argument, it is onto-theology that
informs first philosophy—to the degree that theology is concerned with first causes
before considering final ones (Aubenque, 1962; Follon, 1958: 418).
In book Lambda (VI-X), Aristotle’s “god” is specifically approached, and in
negative terms. The characteristics of the Prime Mover are negations of imperfections in
sensuous substances (Follon, 1958: 419). And, while the prime mover is indeed a
particular being, rather than Being in a universal sense, theology and ontology are
intertwined because the particular being that is first can only be that which exists
independently of other entities, finite existence (Aristotle, 1933: book Lambda). In
Levinas Totality and Infinity, does not address the distinction between first and final
causes, but it surreptitiously informs his entire discussion of desire there, and it is at the
center of his concerns in 1982 (Levinas, 1969: 180; 155Fr). We will return to this; note
for now that Aristotle’s divinity engenders a unique “desire” in the intelligences close to
it, this characterizes the goodness of the final cause.
On Levinas’s 1982 interpretation of the simultaneous genesis of “ontology-
theology,” existence-in-general is merged with being as necessary and separate. But a
necessary being also implies something not found in the strictly ontological framework of
first philosophy: being, understood as the Prime Mover, is the Good itself. Hence, there
are always two principles: existence-in-general, and the Good, for which “contrary to its
nature can happen” (Follon, 1958: 415).
5
The theological-ontological relationship between first and final causes raises
difficulties which Levinas reads in phenomenological terms. As first cause, the divinity
belongs to, yet stands apart from that to which it gives rise. As final cause, it exerts the
“attraction” implicit in perfection. Deformalized, this is true of the divine as of the human
dimension, and the paradox of the “dual inspirations” (Follon, 1958: 416; Aubenque,
1962: 279) in Aristotle’s Metaphysics admits a phenomenological translation when the
grounds for this tension are set into a hermeneutics of lived experience. Both features
noted are crucial to unfolding a first philosophy that can be called “ethics.” In 1982, this
motivates Levinas’s explicit turn from the Metaphysics to the Nicomachean Ethics, where
we find a parallel, aporematic approach to the question of who is perfectly happy.
Levinas observes: “[If the] elements of self-sufficiency…and of freedom from weariness,
insofar as these are possible for human beings…are patently characteristic of
[intellectual] activity: then this activity will be the complete happiness of man…”
(Aristotle, 2002: 1177b 25-30). In short, our finite human freedom entails the quest for an
activity that spares us fatigue and dependency. This could not be politics or other
employments. “[B]ut such a life will be higher than the human plane; for it is not insofar
as he is human that he will live like this but insofar as there is something divine in him,
and to the degree that this is superior…will its activity too be superior” (Aristotle, 2002:
1077b 25-30).
The sovereign activity of contemplative intelligence is the property of something
analogous to a final cause. As a life it is desirable thanks to something inhuman in finite
beings, something “divine.” Nothing lower than the life of contemplation suffices to
happiness, as “each of us would seem actually to be this” divine, inhuman thing
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(Aristotle, 2002: 1178a 3). Aristotle’s argument, which Levinas follows, unfolds as the
parallel between the contemplative life, the sovereignty of the first cause, and the
entelechy of the final one. But the paradox remains. The wisdom approaching the first
cause is devoted to a superlative being, but a being among beings nonetheless, in which
case ontology is the first philosophy. If, however, the first cause constitutes something
separate, foreign to being, then the question arises of how it exerts any influence on
existence. In the Ethics, if the highest reflective existence is desirable, then somehow we
must work against our “nature.” If the highest reflective existence is foreclosed given our
embodiment, then a specific ethics comes to the fore at two levels: first, ethics, with its
central concern for justice, the cornerstone of virtues, is primordial (Aristotle, 2002:
1129b 29). However, ethics as the object of a wisdom, in which something other than our
nature attracts that nature and moves it beyond itself, will also be fundamental to an
ethics qua first philosophy. Levinas proceeds along both these lines, even as he
denounces the Western hypocrisy that consists in being simultaneously attached to the
true (ontology as first philosophy) and to the good (theology as first philosophy)
(Levinas, 1969: 24-26; XII-XIVFr). “Ethics” is understood here (in Levinas as in
Aristotle) as a manner of living, with its accompanying evaluations; as an ethos (ηθος and
έθος, cf. Aristotle, 2002: 1103a 15-19).
In the Metaphysics as in the Ethics, then, final causes, whether divine being or
the divine life, are beyond human understanding and action, although they exert a
decisive force on desire (Levinas, 1969: 25; XIIIFr). In the “beyond” adumbrated by
Aristotle’s negative method, something like an epochē unfolds, suspending distinctions
between theory and practice and holding open contemplation of the meta-physical, even
7
as humans are turned toward justice as universal virtue. This is what Levinas argues
explicitly in 1982. Less obvious is the fact that he worked out the same parallel logics
between metaphysics and ethics in the “Preface” and early chapters of Totality and
Infinity, without explicitly referring to Aristotle.
The 1982 seminar on “First Philosophy” is a polemical reading of Aristotle. But if
the Western tradition is indeed onto-theological, whatever the point of departure we take
(from ontology or theology, from books Gamma or Lambda), Levinas will stake his first
philosophy on the qualitative separation of these two inspirations. In his own substitution
of ethics for first philosophy (where ethics combines our sensuous, intersubjective
connection and the repetition of “responsibility”), Levinas sets the final cause of
metaphysics into ethical life, where it becomes a “metaphysical desire” for sociality
(Levinas, 1969: 39; 9Fr); this, even as factical existence remains ambiguously chaotic, if
occasionally concerned with justice as a demand.
The same seminar provides a roadmap to the two great works, Totality and
Infinity and Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence; we can use it to guide us through
the phenomenological work done in these magna opera. In 1961, Levinas deformalizes
Husserl’s alter ego, which had been constituted as an Other whose behavior is similar to
mine. In Totality and Infinity, the Other amalgamates Aristotle’s first and final causes: it
is beyond thematization because it confronts me in a time that is specific to sensibility
and affectivity—a time that precedes in some way the structured flow of consciousness.
An intuition of goodness is concentrated in the face-to-face encounter, which is
independent of “being” yet leaves a trace in existence (Levinas, 1969: 39, 48, 63; 9, 18-
19, 34Fr). Levinas fairly credits the “epekeina tēs ousias” (the “beyond-being”) to Plato;
8
however, it is Aristotle who inaugurated a less formalistic approach to embodiment in
which the primacy of intersubjective life can appear. Thus, Levinas’s choice is
unsurprising when one thinks of the resources in Aristotle. Heidegger’s own critique of
Husserl’s phenomenology revisited Aristotle, Augustine and Paul. Levinas’s proposed
deformalization “humanizes” the transcendence and desire that characterize respectively
Aristotle’s first and final causes; however Levinas will not go as far as Heidegger in
deformalizing of transcendence: “Transcendere means to step over; the transcendens…is
that which oversteps as such and not that toward [wohin] which I step over” (Heidegger,
1982: 299; 425Gr). For Levinas, the re-conceptualization of what is human, in light of
desire for the Other who is firstly beyond the physical as object of cognition (and
opposed to Heidegger’s “care”), is brought forth through our intersubjective encounters,
which inflect the social ethos itself and describe the fundamental spirit of original
“religion” (Levinas, 1969: 40; 10Fr). “Metaphysical desire” (Levinas, 1969: 42; 13Fr),
then, according to the spatial metaphor that Levinas employs for an affective movement
and pull, “trans-ascends” toward the Other (Levinas, 1969: 35; 5Fr), redoubling nature
with sociability and restructuring the “space” proper to Intersubjectivity itself. The Other
is and is not a “being” among others. Ethically, the Other is beyond being, and
cognitively, it is the first being that introduces me to a common world, as we will see.
Thus the parallels with Aristotle’s unmoved final cause (Aristotle, 1935: 1072b 2-13)—
centering on a “desire” similarly provoked by a being sui generis upon proximate beings,
and for Levinas, upon “me”—are clear. Certainly, “me” should be understood as a
subject in the accusative case; it refers to an “I” that is not the source of its acts. In
Levinas, this is another way of taking up Aristotle’s finite freedom as a freedom
9
“invested” by the Other (Kisiel, 1993: 277-83). In his 1982 critique of first philosophy as
onto-theology, Levinas draws a concept of finite freedom—the raison d’être of ethical
life—from book X of the Nicomachean Ethics (Levinas, 1998a: 72; Cf. Aristotle, 2002:
1177b 25-30). He opposes this to its traditional conception: “If freedom denotes the mode
of remaining the same in the midst of the other, knowledge, where an existent is given by
interposition of impersonal being, contains the ultimate sense of freedom. [Finite
freedom] would be opposed to justice, which involves obligations with regard to an
existent that refuses to give itself, the Other [Autrui, the other person], who in this sense
would be existent par excellence” (Levinas, 1969: 45, trans. mod; 16Fr).
In characterizing finite freedom as the invested freedom of the face-to-face
encounter, Levinas restores the transcendence explicit in Aristotle’s dual viæ negativæ:
this freedom desires a deformalized and “humanized” final cause, something that in
acting never fully phenomenalizes: “The ethical relation, opposed to first philosophy
which identifies freedom and power, is not against truth; it goes toward being [l’être] in
its absolute exteriority, and accomplishes the very intention that animated the movement
unto truth” (Levinas, 1969 : 47 trans. mod; 18Fr). We see that Levinas makes his “final
cause” both a transcendence “opposed” to first philosophy as ontology, and a movement
toward being as the human being. In the desire for what is not phenomenal as an object of
contemplation, two important things occur. First, the fact central to metaphysics and logic
—viz., the adequation between mind and thing—breaks down, even as, second, the
condition essential to all intersubjective constitution in phenomenology is realized.
The dimension of the divine opens forth from the human face. Our relation
with the Transcendent freed from all captivation by the Transcendent is a
10
social relation. It is here that the Transcendent, infinitely other [cf. Aristotle’s
final cause], solicits us and appeals to us….The [structural] atheism of the
metaphysician means, positively, that our relation with the Metaphysical is an
ethical behavior and not theology [not a logos on first causes], not a
thematization, be it a knowledge by analogy, of the attributes of God….Ethics
is the spiritual optics….Metaphysics is enacted where the social relation is
enacted... (Levinas, 1969: 78; 50-51Fr)
Transposing the final cause to the human face understood as expression and the
gaze that singles “me” out, Levinas effects two fundamental shifts in first philosophy.
First, relations with transcendence become thoroughly intersubjective, before there is talk
of who the Other is qua individual. Second, Levinas plays Aristotle’s theology from book
Lambda off against his metaphysics (or ontology) in books Gamma and Epsilon.
Ontology requires no “god,” something Aristotle may have understood as he deployed
the two rival sciences of being qua being and of the divine as first and last cause. That,
however, is a debate we shall leave to Aristotle’s interpreters. For Levinas, in either case,
the move toward an ethos of sociality predominates. “Ethics is the spiritual optics” means
we are able “to see”—i.e., create meaning through the encounter of consciousness with
its objects—precisely because the social relation, moved by the “transcendence” of the
face as expression and ethical resistance, lays claim to no transcendent entity, to no
invisible god. Levinas’s deformalization argues that it is human interaction alone that
allows us to think of an invisible yet (personal) divinity. This is no mere “sublimation of
a Thou” (Levinas, 1969: 78; 51Fr). It is the way sociality unfolds, the ethos that is
intersubjectivity, in all the ambiguity of standing within and without being. Worth noting
11
here is the way in which Levinas dismantles Heidegger’s initial destruction of Husserl’s
time-consciousness, Heidegger transferred the question of time as immanent
transcendental flux to time as the temporalization of care-alongside-things-in-the-world.
Under phenomenological brackets, Levinas will argue, against phenomenology with its
search for the grounds of intentionality, that “the Other is the principle of phenomena.
The phenomenon is not deduced from him; one does not rediscover him by tracing back
from the sign [that] the thing would be…for deduction is a mode of thinking that applies
to objects already given” (Levinas, 1969: 92; 65Fr).
Husserlian phenomenology does not “deduce the other,” but in its classical
expression (in the Ideas II, the Cartesian Meditations and the thirty years worth of notes
composing Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität) (Cf. Husserl, 1973; 1990; 1999),
it starts from a self that constitutes an alter ego. Therefore, to understand how the Other
can be Levinas’s “principle of phenomena,” we must turn to Husserl. Let me begin by
reviewing what “first philosophy” meant to Husserl. In the same year that Heidegger was
exploring Aristotle’s De Anima and Rhetoric as a way past neo-Kantian stalemates over
categoriality, Husserl gave a course entitled Erste Philosophie (1923-1924). The course
was an overview of the meaning of consciousness from Plato to Kant, passing through
Descartes and Hume. In an essay on Kant’s philosophy from the same period, 1924,
Husserl spoke of a conversion of the gaze—a new optics—which “raises us from the
level of the naïve positivity of the knowledge of the world to a knowledge of the world
based on the ultimate self-consciousness of knowledge with respect to what it achieves
under the titles of reason, truth, science” (Husserl, 1956: 286). Levinas’s theme of an
optics thus comes from Husserl, notably as a self-reflective approach to knowledge. In
12
Husserl, this depends on a transcendental subjectivity understood as the consciousness of
temporalization and the temporalization of consciousness. Now, the paradox of internal
time-consciousness is that it flows steadily even as it preserves the chronological
positions of events taking place within it. The self-consciousness of knowledge, as a
reflectivity describing the structure of immanent temporalizing was, in 1925 as already in
1905 (the date of his first lectures on internal time-consciousness), the ultimate
foundation for Husserl’s optics (Husserl, 1969: section 36).
The evidence acquired at the same time brings forth the correct meaning
according to which we must understand…Kant’s heritage: important…is…to
understand the ultimate meaning of his revolution…better than he himself,
who was its initiator but not its fulfiller….Yet this understanding must be
expressed in a work that is fundamentally scientific;…in conformity with its
essence, [it] must begin without presuppositions;…it must draw from
originary consciousness. (Husserl, 1956: 286)
As critique, first philosophy is genetic phenomenology only when the latter is the science
of consciousness in its fundamental forms, which deploy regional ontologies like biology
and psychology. A thinking of a certain prime mover thus persists in Husserl (as time),
although we are far from Aristotle’s conception of protē philosophia. Confronting the
new foundation, Levinas accepts (already in 1930) certain advances made by Heidegger’s
deformalization of Husserl’s residual idealism (Levinas, 1995: 153-158). However, he
also accepts the primacy of Husserlian egology for the constitution of first philosophy
(Levinas, 1998b: 150). Nevertheless, in 1961, Levinas poses a question that
revolutionizes Husserl’s starting point: What is it that allows consciousness to constitute
13
objects as part of a common world—as objective entities? If this question admits a
genetic answer, then phenomenology must show how it reaches that answer. It is here
that we encounter “the Other [as] the principle of phenomena.” Despite his 1920s work
on Einfühlung (empathy) (Husserl, 1973: 660-661; Husserl, 1990: 175-80; 167-72Gr), the
constitution of the other’s body, even the meaning of sexual relations, Husserl remained
with a conception of subjectivity as monadic (Cf. Luft, 2011). The paradigmatic, if
controversial expression of this is paragraph 49 of Ideas I “Absolute consciousness as the
residuum after the annihilation of the world” (Husserl, 1982: pp. 109-112; pp. 114-
117Gr).
The Genetic Order of Phenomenological Constitution
Steven Crowell offers an illuminating analysis of the intersections between
Totality and Infinity and Husserl’s 1929 Cartesian Meditations. There is a parallel
between the monadic self described by Husserl for whom the fundamental strata of
consciousness include the flow of temporalization and the sphere of “ownness,” and the
phenomenology of “separation” in Levinas (Crowell, 2010: 9). Separation denotes for
Levinas (Levinas, 1969: 109-21, 147-51; 81-94, 114-16, 120-25Fr) the activity and
variety of consciousness in but not reducible to its world. Separation recapitulates both
Husserl’s intentionalist monad and expands Heidegger’s structure of care. As he had
already argued in the 1940’s, Levinas will urge that separation contains two terms: first,
an embodied consciousness that comes out of and returns to itself in waking and sleeping,
always preserving a margin of autonomy relative to ontic existence. Second, an
indeterminate universe of light and darkness, which he calls the element: sky, air, sun.
14
This universe, or brute nature, is not yet humanized, and our movement within it is
essentially pre-linguistic, which suggests it has, for us, a mythical format (Levinas, 1969:
140-42; 114-16Fr). This elemental universe is reflected in the creativity of mythical
thought, in which being unfolds without the stabilization of identification and concepts.
At this level, and evincing the plasticity of continuous creation, or better, natural
production, existence is “coming always, without my being able to possess the source”
(Levinas, 1969: 141; 114Fr). Crowell adds “there is no reason why [in the elemental] a
tree cannot turn into a maiden, or a butterfly…” (Crowell, 2010: 14). Autarchy and
enjoyment here move between immersion and separation in the activities of nourishment
and play; but only a shelter that is mine protects separation from this continuous
production without structure or limit (Crowell, 2010: 9; Levinas, 1969, 155; 128-129Fr).
This is because, with the shelter secured, we can begin to contemplate, thereby conferring
form on this mobile universe.
It is impossible fully to inhabit this mythical dimension of existence and
simultaneously to thematize it without an additional element able to bend the vector of
our intentional consciousness back from its immersion in elemental processes and toward
re-presentation. Indeed, re-flection takes shape thanks to something we could characterize
as the return of self and things to an “I” that can find itself in the accusative case. For
Levinas, the “I” is neither in the nominative nor in the accusative when pleasurably
immersed in the elemental. Pure acts require no subject. A tree does not single me out
and, for that reason, within this mode of existence (which does not disappear with the
psychological development of an ego), the tree is essentially no thing. As the sensuous
pre-conceptual dimensions of being, then, the element comes to be ordered through the
15
objectification of the world in dialogue, when I offer my interlocutor entities as if picked
out against horizons of that hitherto unqualifiable world. A space of common names (as
opposed to the verbality of “essence”) emerges as a shared world in which pure sensory
qualities or fields concretize. This is the work of dialogue, rooted in what Levinas calls
the performative of “Saying,” which amounts to responding in the modality of
spontaneous sincerity (Levinas, 1998c: 45, 48-53; 77, 81-90Fr). Dialogue does not
presuppose language on this account but gives rise to it praxiologically (Jakobson, 1995:
94)—hence the inevitability of ethics as first philosophy. In 1961, the situation of
dialogue supposes a concrete encounter, the face-to-face, in the immediacy of which what
will emerge as “I” experiences the emotional force of singularization through a gaze
coming from something naked and vulnerable. What we call eyes, nose, flesh is, in its
immediacy—its affective impact on us—neither a consumable nor sheer indeterminacy.
It is easy to eliminate yet it “resists” simply by seeing me. This introduces into the regard
of the enjoying self a normativity that elicits a sense of responsibility—for the resistant
face. There is nothing utopian about this immediacy. As Crowell shows, it is in this way
that normativity enters into what was hitherto extra-normative and ontic.
Perhaps we cannot directly deduce thematizing consciousness from the
singularizing impact the Other has on me. Whereas Husserl’s analogical constitution of
the Other gave us something “out there” that moves as we do, and whereas Husserl insists
that an “I” is inassimilable to “an Other” because it is never in the site where that Other
is, Levinas takes an additional step. He shows that the Other, as one who expresses itself
physically and verbally, enacts its responsibility for self even as it remains vulnerable
(Crowell, 2010: 13). Responsibility is thus simultaneously accomplished by the me,
16
surprised in its pursuits, and elicited by a being that is not simply free and responsible for
itself but vulnerable to the loss of that responsibility. Before I constitute the Other as an
other like me, before I can engage in conceptual, objectifying reflection, I receive that
singularization—repeatedly—from a being less like me than able to call me to account.
Interpellation may certainly open onto violence or objectification. But this entails being
seen, above all, without being faced. As such, the event of being objectified by a gaze is
patent in Hegel’s master-slave dialectic and Sartre’s phenomenology of the voyeur. In
such moments, the objectified “I” modalizes its world into possibilities for flight or
struggle. For Levinas, however, the face-to-face singularizations open different
modalizations of being in the world, more fundamental than their expression in conflict
or production, because response is the condition of objectification through dialogue. If, in
Levinas, the “contact” element of intersubjective singularization deploys normative
distinctions not found in the element, then Levinas can claim ethics as first philosophy
because dialogue is performance; it is the giving of signification. But dialogue, which
offers objects through words, does not require a threat of violence as in Sartre, it even
precludes it in its incipience. Therefore, the institution of an objective world, in Levinas,
takes shape as the currency used to extend dialogical responsibility. It is not that Hegel
and Sartre cannot give us a first philosophy, what they cannot provide is the creation of
the Good merged with a desire for the Other who transcends my cognition.
Levinas’s 1961 phenomenology thus proceeds as if on two levels, with two
natures: the mythic, mechanistic unfolding of being as drives and production, and “a
strange sort of nature,” or an enigma that concerns the primacy of intersubjective
meaning-creation. Both levels cross through embodied affectivity—stranger still, both are
17
felt as indeterminate sensations or affects. Yet, while they are intertwined, affect is not
reducible to the sensation (Levinas, 1998c: 108-109, 152; 170-173, 237-38Fr). In Totality
and Infinity, this enigma is called “the order of [Metaphysical] Desire…irreducible to
[relations governing] totality” (Levinas, 1969: 180; 155Fr). By 1974, the “strange nature”
is clearly the intersubjective structure of passive sensibility. But would this not sooner be
like a developmental psychology, possessing so many stages of ego-development? That is
hard to say, since the simplest act of objectification and concept-building presupposes
intersubjective openness and an Other. In any event, a two-leveled “nature” cannot be
reduced to brute existence; something like an intersubjective flesh unfolds, passively, as
natural, yet better than our instinctual selves. Could this be Levinas’s rejoinder to the
Aristotelian divine in us? To the degree that it is, then, Levinas’s divine (Other) enables
theorein, and not the reverse.
If existentialism has taught us the lived modalizations of embodied possibility,
then Levinas’s modalizations culminate with the question: What is the
(pre-)consciousness in which these originary objectifications begin to take shape
(Crowell, 2010: 20-21)? It is at that point that Totality and Infinity ends, with “the
extreme vigilance of messianic consciousness” (Levinas, 1969: 284-85; 260-61Fr).
Reading Levinas from Husserl’s phenomenology, Crowell has argued that the
“reversal of terms,” ethics before ontology, is essential to the intentional objectification
of any external object. Thematizing perception may be sensibility broadly construed,
perhaps predominantly seeing; but we must be able to see-as, to see X as Y for there to be
an objective, intersubjective world. Ethics as first philosophy precedes and makes
possible phenomenology as the science of the constitution of entities. Thus we
18
understand Levinas’s strategy of approximating Aristotle’s ethics to the desire prompted
by his final cause. Understood as normativity and evaluation, even virtuous acts, ethics is
rooted in a desire for something that exceeds predication because it founds predication as
the objectified world. The Other sensuously and affectively overflows predication, but its
encounter gives rise to the dialogue out of which a human language unfolds.
However, the particular configuration of ethics and metaphysics that Levinas
proposes as his counterpoint to Aristotle in 1961 is less concerned with the
epistemological ambitions of phenomenology than with a desire that belongs neither to
intellect nor contemplation. If Levinas opens his ontic totality thanks to the transcendence
of the Other, then clearly Aristotle has done something comparable by associating the
final cause and the divine life, whose wisdom orients the other virtues (Aristotle, 2002:
1143b 5-16). Yet, while Levinas’s deformalization of the first cause (the radically
external Other) points toward an unthematizable that is pre-predicative life, the divine life
as Aristotle’s final cause entails a different negative logic: the closer we come to the
divine life, the more our behavior approximates that of the celestial intelligences. The
connection with Aristotle’s ethics is thus dual—theoretical certainly, but also prudential
in the specific sense that phronesis (practical wisdom) best expresses the movement that
Levinas calls the wisdom of love. And, as if demonstrating that the West may not be
equivalently in thrall to the true and the good, Aristotle adds: “wisdom is antithetical to
intelligence, for intelligence has as its objects the definitions for which there is no
account [axioms], whereas wisdom has as its object what comes last, and this is not an
object of systematic knowledge…” (Aristotle, 2002: NE, 1142a 25-28). The respective
accounts of what is first (pure intelligence) and last (embodied wisdom) come together in
19
Levinas’s thought through the rapprochement of Desire and goodness, an argument that
challenges the priority of contemplation over wisdom:
Transcendence is the transcendence of an I. Only an I can respond to the
injunction of a face. The I is preserved [thereby] in goodness, without its
resistance to the system showing itself as the egoistic cry of the subjectivity,
still concerned for happiness or salvation…. To posit being as Desire is to
repel at the same time the ontology of isolated subjectivity and the ontology
of impersonal reason realizing itself in history. (Levinas, 1969: 305; 282Fr,
trans. mod.)
Goodness, as the enactment of saying-to, denotes the institution of the intersubjective tie
which is first philosophy in Levinas. This is not the outcome of a motivating desire, it is
that desire, and it is meta-physical in the dual sense that it makes a world of shared
objects possible in language even as it outstrips existence as “natural,” mechanistic forces
in conflict. In Levinas, first philosophy as ethics overtakes the theorein of first
philosophy as ontology or theology. “One does not prove God thus, since this is a
situation that precedes proof [theology], and is metaphysics itself. The ethical, beyond
vision and certitude, delineates the structure of exteriority as such [ontology]” (Levinas,
1969: 304; 281Fr). In short, God is not the object of theorizing, we enact “God” in
responding to the Other, spontaneously limiting our own freedom. Such would be the
project that Levinas unfolds: first philosophy must cede to ethics as the phenomenology
of enacted intersubjective ties. This implies that first philosophy as mere epistemology is
impossible, because it is derivative, and, finally, that the tension between ontology and
theology in Aristotle’s first philosophy is radically displaced in Levinas: it becomes the
20
twofold moment of the gaze of the Other as summons, which elicits my address as the
beginning of dialogue and of a shared, objective world.
21
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